


Flight of the Tannens

by cyren2132



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Character Growth, Family, Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 07:02:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5447510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyren2132/pseuds/cyren2132
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Biff wanted was a better life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Biff Tannen, 1985

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/gifts).



Biff was already awake when his alarm clock started buzzing. Blinking once but otherwise unmoving, he slowly raised one arm and flipped the switch to silence it. He stared at the ceiling a moment more before taking a deep breath, tossing off the blanket and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Removed from the warm fuzz of his bedding, the morning air felt crisp against his skin. Too crisp. Shaking the last cobwebs from his mind, he rose and stepped into the hallway. Pots and pans clanged in the kitchen. A voice rang out over the sound  
  
“Daddy, there’s something wrong with the bathroom sink!”  
  
He nodded and mumbled something through a yawn before shutting the bathroom door behind him. But between a shower, his morning business and marveling at how much higher his hairline seemed to be compared to last week, the warning went forgotten. As soon as he turned the knob, a jet of water shot straight into his face. He quickly turned the knob the other way, but he was already soaked, and splashes of water clung to the wallpaper behind him, threatening to send it sloughing to the floor. Grumbling, he wiped the water from eyes and stomped to the kitchen, where he grabbed the toolbox from under the sink.  
  
“Breakfast is almost ready,” his daughter Tiffany said as he passed.  
  
“Be out in a minute.”  
  
After fixing the sink and changing his clothes again, he sat down at the breakfast table. The repair had taken longer than expected — and he couldn’t help but dig through his closet, and even the pile of dirty clothes, in the hopes that something other than the green track suit he was currently wearing would be suitable, but nothing else worked. It was all too small, too worn, or just plain too dirty.  
  
So he looked like an idiot, and he was running late, but by god, he was going to get a good breakfast out of the deal. That was one of the virtues of working for McFly.  
  
Sure, everything else about it sucked eggs, but he could always count on George and Lorraine ambling down the block to the tennis courts in their poshy posh neighborhood and their no-good kids not rolling out of bed and leaving for work until 10 a.m. or later. Plenty of time to eat, get there and detail their cars.  
  
Tiffany sat a plate down in front of him.  
  
“Baby, what’s this?” he said at the plate. “You know I hate sausage.”  
  
“Talk to Grammy,” she answered. “She’s the one who keeps bringing it.”  
  
Biff sighed as he tucked into his meal.  
  
Grammy. He’d gone to his grandmother a couple months ago. His business was doing okay, but he knew there was work he was missing out on. With just a little extra funds, he could hire a second guy and get some decals made so that guy could use his own truck on jobs and still advertise for the business. It’d be way cheaper than hiring a guy and buying a second vehicle for him.  
  
She’d balked at the investment, saying he had to prove his business on his own, but every week since, she’d been dropping food by the house, like he was some mook who couldn’t provide for his daughter. He tried to be grateful. After all, she’d raised him after his own mom bailed, and babysat for Tiff while he worked as the night janitor at Hill Valley High after her mom bailed when she was five.  
  
But still. After 46 years, she should know he hated sausage.  
  
“Are you going to the McFly house today?” Tiff asked as she joined him at the table.  
  
“Mmhmm,” Biff said around a mouthful of toast. The toast was good, the eggs were great, and the coffee, as always, was piping hot and just the way he liked it. “Why?”  
  
“No reason,” she answered. There was a silence between them that was filled only by the scraping of butter across her toast. “Say hi to Marty for me.”  
  
Marty. The kid was okay, certainly less of a pill than his old man, but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance anyone from that neighborhood would give anyone from his the time of day. But Tiffy had a little crush, and he couldn’t bear to break her heart.  
  
“Sure thing,” he said as he downed the rest of his coffee and kissed her on the head and grabbed his shoes. “I'm outta time; you have any homework?”  
  
“Just need to interview someone for my English project.”  
  
“Did you decide who to write about?” he asked as he tied the laces on one shoe and brought the other foot up to the seat of his chair.  
  
“I thought I’d talk to Doctor Brown.”  
  
“Doc Brown? That old kook downtown?”  
  
“Daddy, he’s a scientist! He invents things!”  
  
“And I’m sure it has nothing to do with Marty McFly hanging around his place all the time?”  
  
“No!” she said. “I want to be a scientist.”  
  
“You know, honey,” he said gently. “We’re a family of mechanics and jailbirds. Science … it’s a nice dream, but I don’t know that it’s in our cards.”  
  
“That’s just because you don’t believe,” she said as she rounded the table and handed him his lunch pail. “Mechanics and science have a lot in common. Just think, a mechanic could invent a flying car and clear all the congestion on the roads, making for fewer wrecks and cheaper health care when less people get hurt.”  
  
“And suddenly everyone needs a pilot’s license to get to work.”  
  
“Okay,” she said as she followed him to his truck. “What about a car that uses water for fuel? We don’t have to dig for oil anymore and there’s less pollution.”  
  
Biff stuck his key in the ignition and paused. He turned over the engine with a smile.  
  
“Tiffy, you build a car that runs on water, and I’ll service every one of ‘em.”  
  
“Daddy, you really think it could work?”  
  
“It’s a big ocean, baby,”he said as he leaned through the window and kissed her one more time, “but maybe have a backup plan for your interview.”  
  
He watched her in the mirror as he drove away. She was so much smarter than he was. He barely finished high school didn’t even know he’d looked like a damn fool butchering “Make like a tree and leave” until well past then, a realization gleaned from an early draft of one of George McFly’s novels.  
  
McFly.  
  
His grip tightened on the steering wheel. George had spent a long time on that novel, sometimes putting it away for years at time to focus on other projects but coming back to it in fits and bursts. It was his baby, and he wanted it perfect. It was during such a stint five or six years ago — when Biff was filling in as a temporary mail carrier, that he was delivering a package to the McFly house.  
  
“Just set it anywhere on the table,” George had said as he wandered out to tea on the patio with Lorraine. That was where Biff saw those fated pages, and recognized himself in Jeff, the school bully who beat up the egghead and harassed the girl.  
  
It made Biff angry that that little dweeb was going to try to cash in on Biff’s life, and he probably would have torn up the pages then and there if Marty hadn’t come running into the room, 10 years old and all smiles.  
  
“Biff!” he said as he jumped onto a dining chair. “Can you fix my car?” He’d set a small remote-controlled Jeep on the table, where it sat lopsided. The front axle had come loose and left the wheels sitting in a janky angle.  
  
“Can’t you get your dad to fix it?”  
  
“Nah, dad’s no good with cars.”  
  
Biff picked up the car and held it in his hands. It wasn’t a very complicated thing, and a little gentle tugging popped the wheels back into place.  
  
“There you go, kid.”  
  
“Thanks!” Marty had exclaimed, going so far as to run around the table and give him a hug before racing back down the hallway, his car humming all the way.  
  
Yeah. Marty was an OK kid. And a few weeks later, the book pages disappeared.  
  
He’d heard rumblings recently about George’s next book, and he suspected this was the one.  
  
He forced himself to loosen his grip on the steering wheel. Nothing good comes out of staying mad, he reminded himself. Sure, George McFly humiliated him and took everything he ever wanted, but Biff ended up with a great kid and his own business. Even if it was detailing other peoples’ cars. Sometimes that meant a little bit of groveling, but a small business workshop he went to had drilled one thing into him: You gotta play along to get along. And that was never more true than at the McFly house. He could put on a dumbass grin and bop around for them, because they tipped well.  
  
And eventually, all that money would add up, Tiff would go to college, get a great job and he’d spend his golden years keeping her water-powered cars in gear.  
  
But flying cars? Never gonna happen.


	2. Biff Tannen, 2015

Biff rubbed the rag across the fender of his car, scowling at his own reflection. When did he get so damned old? He could hear Griff inside Cafe 80s, harassing the youngest McFly kid. Marty Jr, he thought was his name. Satisfied with his work, he walked around the back just as the McFly boy came running out of the cafe. He stole a little girl’s hoverboard before Griff and his friends were able to give chase.  
  
It was all very familiar. Maybe he’d seen it once in a movie.  
  
As they sped away, Biff hobbled to the driver’s side of his car and got in. He’d just started the engine when he heard a honk from above.  
  
“Come on, old man, I’m tryna make a landing here!”  
  
Biff shook his fist at the 20-year-old in what had to be Daddy’s New Car, put his in gear and rolled away.  
  
His car didn’t fly.  
  
Who wanted a flying car, anyway?  
  
Biff drove to Tiffany’s house and parked on the street.  The front door recognized him before he even got to it and opened wide, announcing his presence over a small speaker. Tiff came hurrying down the stairs, attaching a pair of earrings as she came.  
  
“Hi, daddy,” she said as she squeezed past him and pulled her jacket from the hall closet.  
  
“Hey, baby.” Just the sight of her made him smile and forget about all he complaints of old men in the 21st century. “I saw Griff at Cafe 80s; it was the strangest thing-”  
  
“Yeah, daddy, I heard. I’ve got to go bail him out of jail, and now I’m going to be late to this shareholders’ meeting. I wish I could chat, but I have to go.” The words sped out of her mouth like those Max Headroom commercials she loved as a kid, and Biff barely had time to catch his breath.  
  
“Ah, it’s no problem, maybe we can talk later.”  
  
“Maybe,” she said, giving her makeup one last look in the hall mirror. “But right now I’ve really got to go. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen, and stay as long as you like.” She leaned in to kiss his cheek, but Biff wasn’t sure either of them had made contact before she was gone, breezing out the door like a woman on a mission.  
  
He watched her go until the door slid shut. The times certainly had changed. A series of photo screens on the wall captured it all in perfect clarity. One was a collection of historical photos Tiff and dug out of Grandma Gertrude’s boxes for a middle school project. A few from Biff’s youth, a couple of his parents before that all went to hell. Even a grainy old image of Great Grandpa Buford was in there. A second screen cycled through images of Tiff’s life: science fairs, Christmases, school pictures and graduations. And the third focused on Griff. There was one from his birth. A lot of Christmases and birthdays, baseball photos and even one of Griff sitting on Biff’s lap, clutching the steering wheel of an old Ford convertible. But as Griff got older, the photos got scarcer, the candid images of a young life well-lived being replaced with stiff, staged school photographs in front of a variety of backdrops.  
  
The photos pretty much told the tale of when things had gone to pot again for Biff. For a while, his business had been doing great. He expanded the shop, hired new people, and even built up enough to expand, opening another branch in the Seacrest Views neighborhood. That, combined with a modest inheritance after Gertrude’s death and a sizable scholarship helped them lead a comfortable life and send Tiff to Cal Tech.  
  
When Griff was born in 1999, Biff sold the Seacrest branch and used the proceeds to buy a home for Tiff and Griff — and that lowlife Steve if he’d ever come back around — with an in-law cottage in the back for himself. That way, he could watch Griff on days when a babysitter couldn’t and Tiff needed to be at her new job.  
  
That job. It was great for a year. She tried to sell them on the water-powered car, but no one was interested. “There’s so much oil!” they said. “Why would we waste money building new tech when we’ve got everything we need to keep this going strong!” Then she’d busted out the flying car. “Aha! A flying car?! Now THAT’S marketable!”  
  
They’d given her first crack at the design, but when it didn’t produce the height and maneuverability that they wanted, they moved her onto a different project consolidating the power source for a variety of robots in R&D. A year later, the first hoverboard rolled off the line, using the same technology as her original car designs.  
  
Hoverboards went like hotcakes, but Tiff Tannen didn’t see any of that money.  
  
“We were paying you to design a flying car,” they said. “This is a floating board, and we own the technology that went into producing it.” She never saw profits, but Griff always got the latest model of things, free from the company. And five years after that, the first flying car took off, using a design altered maybe two generations from the backbone that Tiff had started.  
  
And when she fought the board, just like any good Tannen would, they offered her a posh office, a seat at the table and a new job coordinating the media around the company products.  
  
She took it, moving from scientist to company shill in one abrupt movement. And at least one of her inventions went on to great success. The battery packs that powered the company’s new robots was put into a fleet of thousands that were shipped out to car dealerships and auto shops across the country: The perfect employee that will never be late, steal from the till or scratch the paint again!  
  
It put Biff out of business a year and a half later.  
  
He didn’t blame Tiff for it. And it wasn’t even that much a hardship — she was making enough for all of them, and really, Biff’s Detail had become more of a hobby than a necessity. But it was the lost time that ate at him. She was never home and he was getting too old to wrangle Griff by the time the boy hit 13 and had his first growth spurt.  And to be honest, Griff was kind of a butthead. Of course, if Biff were honest with himself, he realized, he was a pretty big butthead at that age, too.  
  
It was with that in mind that he headed out the door. He knew Griff would head straight to the Galleria to play video games and whatever else the kids did for fun these days, and Biff wanted to catch him beforehand. Take him out for a milkshake and talk about all the ways Griff could make his life go better before he suffered the same humiliation Biff had went through in 1955. If Griff could make a life that had all the good of Biff’s and none of the bad, he’d be just fine. If he’d listen.  
  
Biff had only just parked his car in a garage and started to walk down the sidewalk when he saw that crazy old Doc Brown talking to Marty Jr. Arguing with him, actually. Biff had no desire to get into any of that. Brown was a madman and Marty 2 was a moron, so instead he stopped, hiding in the shadow of an alley.  
  
“Marty, this is not what I invented the time machine for!” Brown exclaimed.  
  
Time machine? Biff listened closer to the conversation, straining his old ears and eyes. If what he was hearing was right, that WASN’T Marty Jr. walking down the street like a butthead with his pockets hanging out. It old Marty - the Marty he watched grow up — walking around in 2015.  
  
The thought sparked a memory. Late October, 1985. George McFly’s book had just been delivered. Biff had just run outside to show Marty the new matchbooks he’d had made when a DeLorean, just like the one Marty and Brown were standing next to now inverted its wheels, rose up into the air and sped down — or above — the street, disappearing in a flash of light.  
  
He’d chalked it up to the smell of the wax, an overactive imagination and the conversation with Tiff earlier that day, but if it were real? If it had really happened, and Dr. Brown could travel through time in a flying car?  
  
The thought made him angry. Tiff never got the chance to interview him for her paper, settling instead for the science teacher at her school. The so-called scientist went missing for 15 years after that day — some say he was gunned down by Libyans at Lone Pine Mall in some sort of terrorist deal gone bad. Others said he’d died in an explosion after one of his experiments or just got so lost in his work that he forgot to go anywhere again.  
  
He’d turned up around the turn of the century, spouting enough crazy talk to get himself locked up, but if he’d really been gallivanting around all this time? Instead of helping his little girl? Biff stalked over to give them a piece of his mind, but his cane stuck in a crack on the sidewalk, and it nearly sent him sprawling. By the time he reached their spot, they were long gone. But what they had left behind glinted in the trash bin. He retrieved the silver bag, clearly new, and pulled out its contents.  
  
“Gray’s Sports Almanac: 1950-2000.”  
  
He flipped through the magazine. It had everything. The Amazin’ Mets of 1969. The Royals of ‘85. Football, boxing, horse races. Enough to make anybody a billionaire 30 times over. A smile began to form on his lips. He may have missed Brown and Marty this time, but he knew where they were going.  
  
He took off down the street when he saw Griff and his friends, fresh from jail, walking toward him.  
  
“Yo, Gramps!” Griff yelled. “We wanna go to the movies. Give us some money!” Biff reached into his pocket and pressed his cash chip into Griff’s palm.  
  
“Have fun, son” he said and kept walking as the group of boys stared at him. He didn’t care, though. If everything went as planned, the $122 on that chip wouldn’t mean a thing. Nor would Griff’s crash through the clock tower or the years of work, pay and recognition Tiff was cheated out of.  
  
It was dark by the time Biff caught up with the DeLorean, but the vehicle was empty. Looking both ways, he lifted the door and got inside. He was no scientist, but the keypad and display on the dash were pretty self-explanatory. He punched in the day he wanted to go to — one before the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance that changed his life forever — and started the engine. His hand slipped, as he put the car in gear, and before he knew it, the car was 8 feet in the air and purring like a kitten. With a full-fledged smile and the promise of a better life, he took off.  
  
Maybe flying cars weren’t so bad, after all.


End file.
